ABOUT Graham Morehead

Graham Morehead writes about anything he finds fascinating — physics, complexity, the human condition, and just about everything else. He would probably find you fascinating too.

He studied physics and then computer science (and held down various jobs), but his great love is computational linguistics. The big problem he wants to work on is machine translation. Solving it will make some really cool software and foster world peace.

Graham Morehead: All Posts

We cannot yet define consciousness without tautology or hand-waving, but we have learned enough to devise a few supportable statements about it: 1. it happens inside the brain 2. more than one neuron is involved at any given point So, it's in one place (the brain), but it's not in one place (many neurons) ... The unitaryness of consciousness is an illusion. That my consciousness feels singular is merely a manageable fiction. The prefrontal cortex demands it thus. The neocortex... Read more

Graham Morehead, the curator of "The Pangeon," talks at TEDxYouth@JBMHS in Bangor, ME at the Gracie Theatre. Graham talked about his academic challenges and career pit stops mentioning 3 significant mentors who taught him important life lessons. His talk also tackled about how man's exploration made the world a better place. He ended his talk by challenging the listeners to do more of what they are required to do, quoting from him: "Humanity is waking up, be a part of... Read more

Topic for this TED Talk: Save the Urchin Fishery With This One Weird Trick! Unregulated Sea Urchin fishery has left Maine struggling to recover its sea urchin population. Over the years, this precious resource has been exhausted and left unrecovered. A little to few sea urchin species has been spawning in the gulfs of Maine and is reaching alarmingly low levels. Graham Morehead here talks of a possible solution to this concern. In this video, Graham was invited at TEDxYouth@Biddeford... Read more

This talk was given by Graham Morehead, Curator of The Pangeon at the 2014 TEDxUMaine. A man rots unjustly in jail, the sea urchins are dying, and Google Translate doesn't work. Morehead ties together these three disjoint narratives using starlings. His talk tackles the concept of a complex system. Being complex is not the same as being complicated. Even though no entity within a system can see the whole picture, undeniable large-scale patterns emerge from the system. As we learn... Read more

The curator of The Pangeon, Graham Morehead, speaks at TEDx Dirigo. His topic: Save the Urchin Fishery With This One Weird Trick! Graham Morehead is interested in language and thought. An unlikely series of events led him to study computer science and the green sea urchin, Strongylocentrotus droebachiensis. Studying under James Wilson, an economist at the University of Maine, Graham was introduced to the field of complex adaptive systems, a new tool for understanding the ecology of sea urchins, human-natural... Read more

We humans are all alike and we are all unique. We love. We hate. We talk. We touch. We wear clothes (most of us). We sing songs. We dance and we give gifts. We seek out water and meaning. We take care of the next generation. What is "culture?" There are simple answers, and there are difficult ones. Any given culture is a set of symbols. The space of all possible cultures is a subset of humanity's behaviors and perceptions,... Read more

Language is beautiful and language is functional. Language is poetry, song, and prose. Language is the linear expression of ideas. For us humans, language is a technology that goes back over one hundred thousand years. With it I can extract a complex concept from my mind and thrust it into yours. If I be an educator of sufficient skill, I can do so almost against your will. By language we express love. By language we teach our sons and daughters.... Read more

Design is an abstraction. It is both visual and functional. It can take on a slightly different flavor depending on context, just like soy beans. The people who designed your nuclear reactor are not the same people who designed your favorite font. You can design a disaster recovery plan, and you can design an electric toothbrush. Do these skillsets have anything in common? Someone seems to think so. Design itself is a subject to study. There are design classes springing... Read more

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” ― Richard Buckminster Fuller A long time ago, wars were fought over, of all things, salt. Examples include a war Venice fought with Genoa, and various wars in and around France during the time of the gabelle -- a hated salt tax. Could you imagine fighting a war over salt today? What changed? Why don't we fight over... Read more

I am a Bostonian. I lived there most of my life. I was born there. My heart has been aching all week. I heard about the bombs soon after it happened. I kept checking the news. I read about those who were killed. I saw pictures of people being carried away with sickening injuries. So many amputations. So many double-amputees. I was angry. I am angry right now. I want to cry. We found the guys who did it. We... Read more